May 172020
- Tina Horn’s Why Are People Into That podcast has a two-part discussion of the erotics of fascism. Part 1, Part 2
- The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast has an episode on the original Hellraiser film and the short story it was based on, Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart”. It includes a lot of discussion on the relationship of pleasure and pain.
- The Risk podcast has Mollena Lee Williams-Hass telling her story about her childhood influences of eroticized slavery and her development as an African-American woman in the kink world.
- DominaFiles.com profiles Belle Du Jour, arguably the foremost prodomme in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s. “Belle was introduced to B&D back in the late ’60s/early ’70s by a man she was seeing. She owned a cosmetology business at the time. Keeping that business running, she branched out into professional dominance and it wasn’t long before she was New York’s most successful SM entrepreneur.”
- One of the oldest cliches of “damsel in distress” bondage is the woman tied to the railway tracks before an onrushing train. Atlas Obscura probes into this and says it was actually very rare in the silent film rare. The earliest known instance was “an 1867 Victorian stage melodrama called Under The Gaslight,” in which a man is tied to the train tracks and saved by the leading lady. The evidence suggests that this trope was far more used as parody than in earnest.
- Flaunt has an interview with Rick Castro, a gay fetish and BDSM photographer from the 80s who also worked in mainstream fashion photography, where he brought in kink influences. “I would sneak it in, sneaking more each time until eventually I had Veronica Webb in full rubber – Versatile Fashions From Anaheim which did all the kink- from top to bottom.”
- Kink, like everything else, changes with changing technologies and changing conditions. Some sex workers have adapted to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic by moving online. One non-binary pro dominant uses the Nintendo Switch cute-animal game Animal Cross: New Horizons to connect with their clients. “Winter advertises their services through Twitter, and in the game they force clients to water their flowers and pay them bells, the Animal Crossing currency.”
- Astrid Ovalles, maker of the new lesbian BDSM drama Road of Bygones, writes in the Advocate of the poor depiction of kink in mainstream media. She completely dismisses Fifty Shades (“let us erase the Fifty Shades debacle from our tainted memories”) and asks for better representation. “Presently, there are few kinky shows that exist. Regrettably, they give in to representing kinksters as victims of abuse….”
- Race Bannon writes in the Bay Area Reporter on the tearing down of the once-rigid divides in the kink/queer world. “It seems to me that as each day passes we live in a greyer sex and eros world, less confined by entrenched black and white thinking.”
